"Ian McDonald - Verthandi's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

11-space, came revelation. There was Another out there.

****

In the six months it took the Seydatryah fleetтАФone Heart-world, eighty
semi-operational habitats, two hundred twelve thousand ancillary craft and defensive
systemsтАФto accelerate to close enough to light-speed for time-dilation effects to
become significant, Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar searched the Tier of
Anchyses. The world-elevator, which ran from the por-tals of the Virtual Realms
through which nothing corporeal might pass to the very lowest, heavy-gee Tier of
Pterimonde, a vast and boundless ocean, took the star-sailors forty kilometers and
four tiers down to the SkyPort of Anchyses, an inverted city that hung like a
chandelier, a sea urchin, a crystal geode, from the sky roof. Blimps and zeps,
balloon clusters and soaring glid-ers fastened on the ornate tower bottoms to load,
and fuel, and feed, and receive passengers. Ten kilometers below, beyond cirrus and
nimbus, the dread forest of Kyce thrashed and twined, a venomous, vicious,
hooked-and-clawed ecosystem that had evolved over the Heart-worldтАЩs million-year
history around the fallen bodies of sky dwellers.
 The waxing light of tier-dawn found Scented Coolabar on the observa-tion
deck of the dirigible We Have Left Undone That Which We Ought to Have Done.
The band of transparent skin ran the entire equator of the kilometer-long creature: in
her six months as part of the creatureтАЩs higher-cognitive function, Scented Coolabar
had evolved small tics and habits, one of which was watching the birth of a new day
from the very forward point of the dirigible. The Morning Salutationists were rolling
up their sutra mats as Scented Coolabar took her place by the window and imagined
her body cloaked in sky. She had changed body for this level; a tall, slightly hirsute
male with a yellow-tinged skin, but she had balked at taking the same tran-sition as
Harvest Moon. Even now, she looped and tumbled out there in the pink and lilac
morning, in aerobatic ecstasy with her flockmates among the indigo clouds.

Dawn light gleamed from silver wing feathers. Pain and want and, yes,
jealousy clutched Scented Coolabar. Harvest Moon had been the one who bitched
and carped about the muscle pain and the sunburn and the indi-gestion and the
necessity to clean oneтАЩs teeth; the duties and fallibilities of incarnation. Yet she had
fallen in love with corporeality; reveled in the physicality of wind in her pinions,
gravity tugging at the shapely curve of her ass; while Scented Coolabar remained
solid, stolid, reluctant flesh. She could no longer remember the last time they had
had sex; physically or virtually. Games. And war was just another game to entities
hundreds of thousands of years old, for whom death was a sleep and a forgetting,
and a morn-ing like this, fresh and filled with light. She remembered the actions they
had fought: the reduction of Yorrrt, the defense of Thau-Pek-Sat, where Rose of
Jericho had annihilated an Enemy strike-fleet with a blizzard of micro-black holes
summoned out of the universal quantum foam, explod-ing almost instantly in a
holocaust of Hawking radiation. She watched Har-vest MoonтАЩs glider-thin wings
deep down in the brightening clouds, thin as dreams and want. Sex was quick; sex
was easy, even sacramental, among the many peoples and sects that temporarily
formed the consciousness of We Have Left Undone That Which We Ought to
Have Done. She sighed and felt the breath shudder in her flat, muscled chest.
Startled by a reaction as sen-sational, as physical, as any Immelman or slow loop
performed by Harvest Moon, Scented Coolabar felt tears fill and roll. Memory, a